Addict
by Suburban Slasher
Summary: Two tales, revolving around too much free time and unvented frustrations. Takes place during and after episode 2:14. Contains spoilers for that time period, and is overrated for profanity and HousexWilson slash. Dedicated to SanTropez and Neffinesse.
1. A Workweek

"Addict: A Workweek"

by Princess of Pain

Monday, as always, is TiVo night. This knowledge surprised his former roommate, who had quite naturally assumed (what with his habit of watching television incessantly at work) that every night was TiVo night. But the fact was that he had his very own schedule, as he had his own set of personal rules in his life... and woe betide the beeper, cell-phone, or doctor who might interrupt it.

He starts the long evening by poking through the fridge, checking to see if his apartment's former co-resident had left behind any of his cooking. He already knows that James, being as obsessed with cleanliness as he himself is obsessed with unpredictability, cleared out the fridge of any leftovers. He also knows this because this is the third day in a row that he's checked for any remnants of actual home-cooking. But the looking is becoming habit, and though he finds nothing, there's an odd sort of comfort in the ritual.

Left once more to survive his own cooking skills.

He microwaves a box of something-or-other, and when it's hot, he kicks back on the couch and starts to flip through his TiVo library. There are still episodes of Blackadder that he hasn't gone through yet. He'd actually started watching that when his ex-roommate had pointed out that one of the actors could have been his twin. He flips past them all, and settles down with his (is this supposed to be meatloaf, or a segmented wiener-dog?) dinner and a lacrosse match he's already watched.

Later, when the match is over, he tries to flip it to something else--maybe some of the SpongeBob episodes, find one he hasn't seen--but his fingers slip, and he re-selects the same lacrosse match. _What the hell,_ he thinks, and falls asleep on the couch twenty minutes later, a move which both he and his back come to regret.

-----

The only day in the clinic when House is destined not to be seen playing his NDS (or passing said NDS to another patient) is on Tuesday, because that's the night set aside for nothing but. And when he has been bringing it around, it hasn't been with his copy of Prince of Persia. That game is his. No one else may play it. When James was still there, he had moved the cartridge when he was dusting off the piano. He'd been forced to hold his (former) roommate's hair-dryer hostage until the other had been able to find it.

Now, though, he can't find it himself. He knows he left it on the piano, next to the old coaster that holds his usual night-cap, but it's not there now. He wanders, almost purposeless, through his apartment, absently lifting things up and setting them down again without more than a cursory glance beneath them. He's already realized what used to be next to both the coaster and the cartridge: Wilson's personal calendar. Classy, leather-bound, and not very different in color from the Prince of Persia's cartridge-case. He'd picked it up on accident. Well, he'd like to think that his old roommate had done it on purpose -- pulled a prank to drive him absolutely crazy Tuesday night -- but Wilson was never cruel on purpose, and that was the problem.

Huhn. That went to a weird place.

He takes an extra Vicodin for good luck, and goes to be early.

-----

Wednesday is piano night. He orders from Chef Chu's, and while he's waiting for his lo mein to arrive, he turns on the television and watches whatever catches his eye. To the untrained eye, especially in its starting stages, Wednesday can look suspiciously like Monday. However, he is watching one of those shows that appears to be one long montage of accidents and explosions. This is clearly not lacrosse, which has plenty of accidents, but no explosions. Anyone with an eye can tell that it is Wednesday.

When the lo mein arrives, he watches and eats for a few minutes. A rather garish car-accident at a race track sends one of the cars sailing into the stands. He tries to imagine the sort of depraved creature who tunes in to programs like this, and smiles briefly when his mind summons up a picture of himself.

Then, the box is empty. He cracks open the fortune cookie and drops the empty halves into the box. He's never liked them--too sugary. Typically, his old roommate had been the one to vacuum up that kind of crap.

He looks over the fortune. "In bed," he adds aloud, and cracks a grin as he drops it and hobbles over to the piano.

He stops thinking of this Wednesday, for a moment, and ponders the Wednesday before--only about a hundred and seventy hours ago, really. They'd ordered out--him with his lo mein, and his former roommate with his mushu beef and pancakes. They'd eaten, talked about nothing. The other doctor had rolled his eyes with long-suffering good humor when he'd dutifully tacked "in bed" to James's, "You will have great success at work; keep at it." Or had that been embarrassed guilt? Sometimes, he thinks he knows. Mostly, he just goes about his business.

He trails his fingertips over the piano keys for a moment, producing a soft whisper of accidental notes. The last time that any notes had rung forth, there had been two sets of ears to catch them. He decides that his hands feel too stiff to play correctly, and he sits back down before the television.

-----

Thursday is normally bar night.

Before James had moved in, Thursday hadn't exactly been "bar night". It had been something closer to "drink high-tension booze while listening to his blues collection night". He never drunk himself to oblivion, not on a weeknight, but it was always fun to show up Friday morning looking like he hadn't slept in three days (and, on one spectacular occasion, still smelling of Scotch). That hadn't lasted long after his then-roommate's arrival.

The first Thursday found them both drinking until three, having a deep and earnest philosophical discussion about whether or not a bionic SuperWoman who was a conglomerate of all of Wilson's wives and lovers would be capable of ruling the _entire_ universe, or just New Jersey. That had not gone over well the next day, when his friend had been unable to complete his usual morning routine. His hair had not been parted straight, his shoes were scuffed, he accidentally wore the same tie as the day before, and he sported a five o'clock shadow to rival House's normal scruff.

This, his overly-neat friend had decided, would not do.

Next Thursday, when he'd broken out the vinyls and bottles, James had quietly suggested that they attend a bar. The idea of sitting in a room that smelled like peanuts and beer-farts while attempting to drink watered-down swill had not appealed to him, and he was more than ready to inform his ex-roommate of this, until James stunned him with some kind of weird alien ray. At least, that was how it had seemed to his objective mind, for in a matter of minutes, he found himself in a disturbingly classy, Cheers-esque watering-hole. Just the sort of place that only James would want to be caught dead drinking in.

It wasn't that he loved the place, or anything... but, damn it, his fellow doctor had been right. It was a good bar. The juke had never heard of a record that wasn't jazz, the bartender never opened his mouth or tried any of that fake bar-chatter, and Wilson and he turned the place into a bloodbath when a quiz was going on. Best of all, in his friend's eyes, was that they quickly developed the habit of getting home before the p.m. shifted into the a.m., which gave him plenty of time to do all that girly stuff he needed to do in the mornings.

Thursday is bar night. And he's sitting on his couch, flipping past the Blackadder again, wondering if he should give up and drop by the bar anyhow. He knows that if James is there, he won't be with his new, super-special patient. In addition to the fact that said patient is probably still frail as glass, and not up to the rigors of Quiz Night, his friend does not believe in getting drunk around his lovers. Drunkenness is only for one-night-stands. And House.

He does not have time to redirect that train of thought to safer tracks. Luckily, he doesn't have to. His beeper sounds. A few seconds later, his cell phone rings. On any other night, he'd blow both of them off. But it's Thursday, so he picks up, assents, heads off to the hospital. When he actually limps through the doors to the patient's room, Cameron looks like she might well die of shock.

Later, when it's far too late for bar-hopping and he's ready to leave, she asks him what could possess him to work so late. He grins and tells her that he'll get Cuddy to kick it off his clinic hours on Friday.

-----

Friday is, or so it seems, 'be an unforgivably stupid bastard' night.

He argues in favor of cutting and running early. Cuddy, who is just as surprised at House's willingness to put in extra hours as Cameron, actually agrees without much of a fight. He spends his few hours in the clinic avoiding anything resembling work. He's out and on his own by three in the afternoon. On any other Friday, he'd have been so bowled over by his lucky streak that he'd wonder if he was going to be stuck by lighting (or a car -- when it came to calamity, he knew the odds of something spectacular just weren't that great, but one could hope).

Of course, this is not another Friday. It's an extra three hours to ponder... well...

He buys lunch at a deli he's never been to before. He picks at it for a minute, then plants one of his own hairs in his sandwich, so that he can demand a refund. He thinks of seeing a movie; he guns his 'cycle and heads home. He looks at his bookshelves. Nothing there calls to him. He dry-swallows a Vicodin, tilts his head to the ceiling, and thinks about the piano he doesn't feel like playing.

He wanders for a few minutes before happening upon his NDS.

At four, he stands and gives his legs a stretch.

At five, he has a piss. While in the bathroom, he steps on something hard beneath the rug. He pulls it out -- it's that little cuticle-cutter his old roommate used. He drops it in the trash.

At six, the victory music plays forth, and he shuts off the NDS. Cameron might be off work now. He could give her a call. Not that she was exactly going to comprehend his situation. He barely got it himself. He goes to the kitchen, microwaves a box of shit-on-a-shingle, and sits down before the television.

At eight, he turns it off. He has relentlessly flipped channels and has found nothing of interest. He has lingered on no station for longer than five minutes. He dwells on the idea of helping another pretty co-ed pay for her education, one empty hour at a time.

Now it's eleven-thirty, and he can feel the stagnation paradoxically creeping through his brain. Friday is the worst, because Friday has always been no day in particular. A man like him liked routines, but he also liked to break them. The workweek could not be disturbed, but his weekends had always been _his_, damn it, and he was free to do whatever the hell he wanted. That had been before James had moved in, though, and the weekdays and weeknights and weekends had started to mutate from "Dr. Gregory House's time he was graciously donating to Wilson", to "House and Wilson's free time". It was disgusting, and all the more so because it had been so damned involuntary. Now it's his time again, his life, and James had only been here for a few weeks, and he has already forgotten was Friday night was supposed to be, all on its own. He can't have drunk, or played the piano, or listened to music, or toyed with his games, or stared at the TV--those were all in other places.

God damn it, he's lived alone for years. He should know how to cope with... this. He should try the TV one more time. Or buy a hooker. Maybe two. Or throw a hard drunk. Yeah, and toss in a few handfuls of Vicodin, while he's at it. He can pack them in martini olives. Or grind them up and cook them in a spoon.

The house phone rings. He doesn't move from the couch. Inspecting the ceiling in the silent and shadowed apartment is clearly more important than the telephone.

The machine gets it. He does not have a personal greeting recorded. A robotic voice tells the caller to leave his or her message after the tone.

"... Hey."

No _It's James_. No _Greg_ tacked on after the hey. No _hi, hello, how you doin'_. Nothing pleasant and nothing fake. Usually--not always, but usually--Wilson is the only man on Earth who didn't try to spin things around. At least, not with House. And no one else matters.

"I know you're there. And you're not going to pick up. To be honest, I wouldn't want to talk to me either." He clears his throat. "I know it's late. But I, ah, wanted to remind you. Don't forget to do your laundry. I know you're not an idiot, but you seemed to get used to having me in your laundry room on Friday nights. And I'm pretty sure those socks I didn't get to before are still there. Are they declaring themselves their own country yet?"

An attempt at a laugh. House does not laugh with him.

"Listen."

He listens. He can hear the micro-filament of tape whirring in the answering machine. He can hear the hum of electricity radiating from the television. He can hear the self-destruction in the way that James is breathing. In that silence, there is everything.

"... never mind. Get some sleep, for God's sake. I suppose I'll see you on Monday."

Click. No "take care", no "goodbye", no "I was at the bar on Thursday", no "I still have your game", no "I (insert meaningless analgesic of a word here) you". Just click. No pretenses. And no words needed, really, because everybody lies, and words are little more than lies in utero. Just click. And that is fine. Because he needs nothing else. Everyone knows that.

He looks down at his hand. He is holding his bottle of Vicodin. He doesn't remember having taken it out of his pocket in the first place.

No one knows anything. They're all jackasses. Because there are some things he still needs, whether he likes it or not.

He goes to the answering machine. He replays the message twice. His index finger taps incessantly on the button marked "delete", and once, he actually begins to depress it. As it sinks down, he thinks about all the other messages he's deleted on this machine, the real-estate agents and their "Someone else has a better offer"s, and about how James must have known after a time what he was doing. The other doctor was a fool about many things, but he had to have known. Had to.

He shrugs at the empty room, and his intention shifts along with the careless motion. He tells the machine to save it.

He goes to his laundry room, looks around, and sets about the task of not turning all his socks and underwear pink.

_-end-_


	2. Leisure

"Addict: Leisure"

by Princess of Pain

Two drinks--that's when he gets in trouble.

James reclines in his bar-stool, waiting for his second dose of Scotch on the rocks to be delivered to him, and for once, he tries to fight against himself. He knows his own patterns, but that has never stopped him from running through the same old rut: pathetic though it is, he sometimes feels like he's merely a passenger in his own body, and that he, in spite of all his best intentions, sits back helplessly and watches him destroy himself. He guesses that it's that way with all bad habits, but his are a bit nastier than most.

Two drinks are always just enough. It isn't drunk enough to stop him from functioning, or even thinking clearly; it isn't enough to excuse what he will inevitably seek afterwards. But it is enough for his conscience. Three drinks, and he'd once woken up next to someone he'd rather not remember, with his now-ex-wife standing over the bed, staring down at him with fire in her eyes. When he'd stood up, stammering for some kind of excuse as to why there happened to be a drunk co-ed in their marriage bed, she'd punched him in the eye. Going to work with a shiner is cute and rebellious in the movies, but he is merely the head of the Oncology Department, and no Edward Norton. He'd skipped out on appointments until the foundation he'd bought managed to cover it up enough. That is more trouble than it's worth.

Three is too many; it impairs his decisions too much, keeps him out of control of how the wife will find out. Two lets him both assuage his guilt (I didn't know what I was doing) and still get to screw it all up.

It arrives. He stares down at it, wondering if he'll take it this time. He doesn't wonder for long; his libido, as it often does, makes the choice for him. He takes a swallow (cold acid), already glancing around the bar, looking for any particularly lonely twentysomethings.

Ten hours later, he wakes up in a cheap hotel room, the burn of Scotch still sitting heavily on his tongue. His eyes feel like lumps of hot glass. He forces himself to open them, and looks over at the bed's other occupant--brunette, insufferably pretty, at least ten years his junior. And a sheet-thief, for that matter. Now innocent of lipstick, her mouth looks slack and wan. James looks down at his naked body, and sees where most of her lipstick rubbed off.

He sits up, looking over at the bedside table, where his cell-phone and his beeper both lie. He can see that his beeper has numbers backed up on it. He doesn't have to flip his phone open to know that it's got more than a few messages. Sarah would have called all his usual haunts--his office number, his usual bar, House's apartment. She'd know that he hadn't stayed late at the first one, like he told her he would yesterday afternoon. Or that he had left with someone from the second. Or that he'd never shown up at the third, which was his usual alibi, if he actually felt moved to come up with one. Maybe she knew nothing, but Sarah wasn't exactly stupid; he wouldn't have married her if she'd been an idiot.

Besides, he'd told her exactly what had happened to break up his first marriage. It wouldn't be news to her.

James stands. His head is aching from a slight hangover, but nothing that a bottle of juice and a few painkillers won't fix. He manages, by some small miracle, to shower (scrubbing hard, in spite of the painful chafing, to get all that bright-red lipstick off), towel off, dress, and leave without waking up the bed's other occupant. As he walks down the stairs to the hotel's first floor, he realizes that he can't even remember the girl's name. That makes him feel sad and guilty--but not guilty enough.

Maybe that's the problem.

-----

_The end of his marriage with Esther had been the fling with Leslie. There had also been the co-ed, and a few other times when he'd stayed out suspiciously late and come back with lipstick rings around the collar, but Leslie had been the real trigger on that gun. She had not just been a one-night stand. Esther's complete refusal to sleep with him at all during the last four months of their marriage had left him with little recourse, aside from the occasional one-nighter. So long as none of them wound up at their apartment, and so long as he told her it had only been the one night, she seemed to have silently accepted this new fact of life._

_No, Leslie had not been a one-night stand--she had been a full-blown affair, his very first. It had taken Esther only three weeks to realize that James was not coordinating his stories very well. One Friday, when he was supposed to be out of town for a conference with the other heads of departments at Princeton-Plainsboro, Esther had given House a buzz. She could easily have called any of the other departmental leaders, of course, but Greg's number was the only one he ever kept handy. The other doctor had picked up the phone, for once in his miserable life, and had been happy to tell Esther that he had never heard of any such conference._

_Wilson would have been infuriated with him, except that being mad at House for being an insensitive, blunt jerk was like being angry with the sun for shining. He would get more satisfaction out of banging his head against a brick wall._

_When he'd returned after his weekend, flushed and happy from two days in a hotel room with a woman he loved, his wife had already cleared out of their abode. She'd left behind a single shoe, her toothbrush, and a note that contained the name and number of her lawyer._

_He did what any natural man would do, of course, and invited Leslie to stay with him. She'd accepted, and they were happy enough, for the first month or so. Then, there had been... oh, what was her name? Molly? Mandy? Something like that?_

_----- _

When Wilson gets to the apartment he shares with Sarah, she is waiting for him. Deep circles, like bruises, sit beneath her eyes, which are puffy and bloodshot. She's sitting in the kitchen, probably drinking some of that herbal tea she likes--the stuff he can't stand, because of the stench of the St. John's wort. When he stumbles through the kitchen door, an explanation already on his lips, she casually turns in her chair and throws the cup of tea in his face.

It's lukewarm, as Sarah almost never drank tea when it was hot, but James is so expectant of being burnt that for a few seconds, he can feel his skin scream in terrified pain. He stumbles back, running into the doorjamb, his hands clapping over his eyes. It's too late, of course--they're full of stinging water, nothing will shield them now--but one can't fight instinct.

And that is that. He already knows that there will be a long chain of events to work through--the confession, the screaming fight, tears, half-hearted apologies, stonewall refusals, empty and lonesome hotel rooms, men in grey suits, men in black robes, drifts of paperwork and legal motions and forms piled high like some strange snow. He's run through all this before, and although he's tried, he hasn't been able to forget how it's done. But everything else, from the first insult she'd launch in his direction on, is just filler. The real severance has already taken place.

A few hours later, he's setting down in another anonymous hotel room. He thinks about giving House a call--either to suggest that they go on a monumental drinking spree, or demand that Greg apologize for not having the common decency to lie for him, just once. He laughs at the very idea of the latter bringing about anything but his best friend hanging up on him, and goes out to his car, to drive to the nearest liquor store.

-----

_And the nature of his romantic life read like certain chapters of the Torah, those long lists of "This man begat that man" that nobody ever read. Esther had given way to Leslie, who had dumped him over his affair with Mandy (or was it Melanie? Something with an 'm', anyhow). His relationship with Mandy had imploded when she'd caught him stepping out with Therese, who had hit him in the head with a soup-ladle when she found out that he'd drifted between the sheets with Lynette. Lynette, upon finding out that he was with Sarah, had literally thrown him out of her apartment, with the assistance of the thick hulk who she'd adopted as an I-don't-need-you lover._

_Oh, and Sarah was supposed to be the New, Fresh Start. He'd told everything to her, cried a little, and, in one of the most monumental lies ever spoken by human tongue, he had promised to change. Though she was not usually foolish, Sarah had believed him._

_So Sarah divorced him over the nameless twentysomething with the missing lipstick--his first affair in that marriage, and his last. He stayed celibate for a while, a situation which endlessly amused House, before trying out a date with Carrie. From thence, there was Jennifer, Simone, Karen, Allisa, and finally, Julie._

_----- _

Many years after Sarah threw the mug of tea in his face, James wakes up. He feels the sun warming his skin, and sees it turning the insides of his eyelids a glowing red. His eyes fly open, a near-panic clutching at his heart. He hasn't slept until the sun came up in so long that he's forgotten what it's like, and he knows that he's not just late--he is _late_.

He jerks up in bed, his legs a hopeless tangle in the sheets, his heart already thrumming from the sort of fear that only the potential wrath of Dr. Cuddy could illicit. He looks to his alarm clock, and sees that it's five past nine. He's halfway out of the bed before he recalls that it is five past nine on a Saturday morning. No alarm had gone off, not because he'd forgotten to set it, but because he, by some miracle, has no work that day.

Wilson sighs, his body sagging back into the bed with relief. Maybe House can get away with showing up late and leaving early, but he is no House--he's never going to be a brilliant and well-admired doctor. Oh, he's smart, and he's well-liked, but that isn't nearly the same. Mere mortals like himself must arrive on time, if not early, and work late. They must also go in on Saturdays if they are summoned. Hopefully, he won't have to worry about that.

James turns in the bed, pulling more of the sheets over his body, and glances over at Julie. Throughout this entire exercise, she hasn't woken once. He rarely sees her much anymore, and when he does, she's usually like this: sleeping. In a way, this suits him. The first time he'd considered the idea that he might be in love with Julie--not just with sleeping with her, or dating her, or having someone other than House that might care about him--was when she'd been sleeping. He'd turned over in the sheets, glancing over at her, intending to simply fall asleep... and had stared at her for an hour, watching beams of silvery moonlight travel across her face, seeing a gentle peace there, a peace that made her the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

He smiles, silent and subtle, the barest curve of his lips. Most of his contentment is in his eyes. He reaches out to her, draws idle fingertips over her cheek, hoping that she might wake up. A cross expression knits up her eyebrows and turns down her pretty mouth. Still wrapped up in sleep, she turns over, putting her back to him.

Three hours later, and he's sitting in Greg's apartment, eating freshly-ordered Chinese, and watching some weird thing the other doctor TiVo'd. The conversation drifts, casually and without meaning, until House suddenly observes that Wilson is hooked on attention. James is used to House's habit of slicing into conversation with his psychological profiles of the person he's talking to, and James knows that House does it to throw the other person off-balance. So he nods, letting House ramble about how Wilson shoots up neediness, and how Wilson trots from female to female in a desperate search for the neediest woman on Earth. Deep down, he wonders why Greg is so very obsessed with the topic of James's faithfulness.

After a few minutes, he quietly asks House if his Vicodin habit is getting any heavier. The diagnostician falls silent, and stoically returns his attention to the television. When Julie beeps him, Wilson turns his beeper and his cell-phone off.

-----

_He'd loved all of them, in different ways, which had not stopped him from buying a second drink. And his mind was a long catalogue of every break-off, the very moment when the relationship finally bled out. When it came to Carrie, he hadn't waited until she suspected: he'd simply told her, and the light in her eyes had shattered like expensive crystal. Jennifer had been crying, holding up one of his work-shirts, with telltale traces of lipstick on the collar. Simone had actually followed him to the hotel room, and had talked a key out of the clerk in order to catch him in the very act and call him a useless bastard. Karen had chased him out of her apartment by throwing a lamp at him. Allisa hadn't said anything at all--just turned her back on him and cried, and he'd felt the guiltiest about what he'd done to her._

_Julie, though. Julie would be different. And she was. There were times--there had been times when he'd tried to go through with it. And a few when he almost had. He'd start to show his symptoms (new shoes, new tie, let me buy you lunch), but the infection never resurfaced. He could never quite bring himself to find another girl, not even when another girl had found him. That had gotten particularly hard towards the end, when Julie was dodgy and distant, never there even on the rare occasion when they made love._

_But no matter how hard it had gotten, it was going to be different this time. Perhaps because he was older, and his libido was easier to negotiate with; perhaps because he was tired of looking and being lonely; perhaps because he was afraid that if he didn't find_ someone _soon, he'd turn into House. But whatever the roots, the blossoms were still the same: he had not successfully cheated on her. Which was why she'd been able to so aptly cheat on him._

_----- _

A whole series of afters--after he found Julie and her boy-toy, after the screaming fight, after he cried, after he showed up at House's door, after getting used to each other's routines with a speed that was surprising--Wilson wakes up in Grace's bed.

He lies there, looking at her sleeping body, her quiet face, his mind a cycle of self-torment. He replays every moment of yesterday afternoon, how he didn't even have to have drink one, how she had seemed so lonely and that loneliness had spoken so eloquently to how he felt, how that was all he'd needed to excuse everything in the moment. He lies there, thinking of how pretty she looks with the sun coloring her cheeks, and of how the utter destruction of his career is lying right next to him--

_I'm a bastard,_ he thinks. Here Grace is, dying by the second. He's taken utter advantage of her, broken every single rule on doctor/patient relationships that he can think of offhand, and one of his very first thoughts is not about Grace might feel about this when she wakes up, but about what Cuddy might think if he got caught. Or his underlings. Or House. House might actually throw him a party, celebrating the first time that Wilson had ever been a more flagrant rule-breaker than House himself. James thinks that he can hear him laughing, until he realizes that he's shoved Grace out of his mind once more.

He is not just a bastard; he's an _utter_ bastard.

Wilson gets out of Grace's bed without awakening her. He's almost surprised by how calmly he accepts his self-diagnosis. He's also perplexed by the guilt he feels. It's there, but it's not nearly proportional to what he intellectually understands that he has done. He goes to the bathroom, has his morning piss, and is washing his hands when he realizes that he has had an affair.

James stares into the bathroom mirror. His dark eyes are propped up by even darker circles. His hair is a cowlicked mess. He has the beginnings of a five o'clock shadow. He looks like he's been staying up nights at the office, not like he's been staying up nights sleeping with patients. And he can't have had an affair, because Julie and he were on a bullet-train out of the Land of Separation and into the hellish Realm of Divorce. There is no one for him to cheat on, no heart that is his to break. There is no one that he needs to keep so badly that he must drive them away. No one who needs to have what a bastard he is proved to them. And he feels a little panicked at this, because except for the lack of booze, this does have all the earmarks of a classic Dr. James Wilson Fling, but he cannot figure out who it is that he's trying to cut off.

Grace wakes up while he's getting dressed. A five-minute conversation later, and Wilson is climbing into his car, heading back to House's apartment. Greg hasn't woken up yet, so he might have no idea that Wilson was never home at all that night.

When the diagnostician does wake up, he finds James in the living-room, packing his things, a lie already prepared.

-----

_Julie's unfaithfulness had made him think of Melissa's. Once, when James Wilson was not a suave doctor, a tipsy grad student, or a hearty-partying pre-med student, he'd been a quiet high-school senior. Much like he was later in life, he was smart and well-liked. Not brilliant enough to be isolated from the whole of the student body, and not popular enough to be isolated from his studies. A fair enough balance. And this high-school Jimmy had been in love with a girl named Melissa Howard._

_He'd met Melissa as a sophomore, when they'd shared a homeroom class, and he had conquered his typical shyness to strike up a conversation with her. A few idle chats later, and he'd asked her on a date. A few dates later, and he'd asked her to a dance. A few dates after that, and she'd let him take her in the backseat of his car; it wasn't her first time, and that was fortunate, because he hadn't had any idea of what to do._

_Melissa and Jimmy had been the ideal, sweet-enough-to-induce-diabetes high-school couple. They'd met each other's parents. They'd already made their plans to marry. God, his head and his body had been full of her. And then, there was the sudden shyness, the coldness that innocent little Jimmy hadn't understood, the broken dates. After a few weeks of wondering and worrying, Melissa showed up at school with a pin from the Alpha Gamma Rho on her blouse. It was admirable, the way she'd been so unashamed._

_----- _

James has a godawful fight with House when House realizes where it is that Wilson moved. It reminds him of every fight he's had with every girlfriend and wife he's betrayed. After it's over, and they both stomp off on their separate ways, Wilson drives to the bar--the one he and House haven't been to since he moved out, the Thursday-night bar. It's the right night to be here, even though bar night has mutated into poker-night. He has more shots than he is accustomed to having on a weeknight, or any other time.

When he wakes up in the morning, he finds that in his drunken sloppiness, he somehow managed to get back to the right apartment, and did so without stopping in an hourly hotel-room on the way. Grace, concerned, sits up in the bed, asking him where he was the night before. He limps towards the bathroom, seeking pain medication, and grumbles that it's none of her business. Once he gets there, and he realizes who he sounds and looks like, he has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing until he cries.

Grace goes on to fulfill her dying dreams. James thinks that he is happy for her. He finds another hotel room; this one charges by the week.

A few Thursdays into the future, and Wilson is lying on his bed, watching the cable TV and thinking of very little. He has a drink at his elbow, but he's been ignoring it. He can't quite drop the habits he'd developed while enduring House for the time they'd lived together. He still does his laundry on Fridays. He settles down and watches television on Mondays. Tuesdays find him renting a game system from a nearby Blockbuster. On Wednesday, he brings home whatever paperwork needs to be done, and he plays one of his classical music CDs as he worms his way through an endless stream of forms. It's Thursday, so he must be drinking, but the alcohol doesn't taste right without the rigors of Quiz Night. He pours it out of habit, and usually tosses most of the glass's contents into the sink before he goes to bed a few hours later.

This Thursday, however, something different happens: his phone rings. James looks over at it distrustfully, unconsciously raising an eyebrow at it. Work only calls him this late if someone has died. It might be Julie's lawyer, or his lawyer, but it was too early in that game for much action to be going on at ten o'clock. And no one else calls him anymore.

He picks it up. House tells him that he's taken a few of his work files hostage, and that if Wilson does not bring him his copy of u Prince of Persia /u , Wilson will never see these files unstained with body fluids ever again. House offers to take a picture of the files to prove he has them. James declines; to be honest, he couldn't care less.

James drives over to 221B, presenting House with the game-cartridge he'd accidentally picked up. Greg looks over his shoulder, clears his throat, and says that he has too much beer to drink on his own.

Fifteen hours later, Wilson wakes up. He immediately regrets this new development: his body is an aching mess, his mind feels like it's been scrambled, and his mouth tastes like the inside of a beer-keg that has started to grow mold. He grunts in surprised pain, his hands drifting up to clap over his eyes, sealing out the sunlight that is trying to pry through and assault his poor ocular nerves. James takes a deep breath, trying to soothe his nausea-spinning stomach. As with most hangovers, everything is amplified, and he can smell every scent cloying in the air: stagnation, old sweat, House's cologne.

In the bathroom, he surveys the damage. James is not the wildest lover, especially for someone who is, according to his best friend (?), addicted to sex. He's used to waking up with nothing more permanent than a lipstick smear, the occasional scratch, a love-bite or two. This, then, is not what he is used to.

His eyes run over what he can see of his naked body's reflection in the mirror. Teeth-marks still on his neck. An impressively-red hickey on his shoulder. A painful bruise circling around one of his nipples. Each mark is attached to a memory, and as he stares, he finds that he can dissect each one from the drunken haze of the night before--Greg's hands slipping indelicately over his chest, Greg's tongue licking over the bright-red mark he'd made, Greg biting down onto him as he came. He does not have to turn around and check out his back; he can feel the red, ragged lines (blunted nails dragging down his pale skin) radiating soft heat from his back, and a dull, throbbing ache (o god that's so).

_Oh, boy,_ James thinks. And he's disturbed, not to mention dismayed--but not because of what they have done. Not because Julie's lawyer is going to have a field day with this if they get caught, and as it's a divorce lawyer's business to catch such things, the odds are fantastic that they will be. Not because House is notorious for making the people who love him absolutely miserable.

No, he's disturbed because _none_ of that concerns him in the slightest.

He hears Greg turn over in the bed. The diagnostician sleeps like a stone. If he's going to follow his usual imperative, and leave, then this is the time.

-----

_An hour into the future, House wakes up to the sound of a ringing telephone. He snatches it off the hook automatically, puts it to his ear, and rolls his eyes when he hears Cuddy demanding to know where he and Wilson are. She kindly informs him that he's a grand total of six hours late to work, a hospital-wide record, and she says that if he is anything other than deathly ill, she will drive to his apartment and drag him into the clinic herself._

_He shifts in the bed, letting her rave, reaching over for the Vicodin bottle and clapping his first dose into his mouth. He looks over to the other side of his bed, where Wilson had collapsed the night before. It's empty. He says to Cuddy that he's really, truly sick, and as he fakes a cough, he reaches out and touches the bunched-up, wrinkled ground-sheet on that side. It is cold._

_He dickers with Cuddy for a minute, not really paying attention to what they're saying--that dance is so old that he can sleepwalk through it. When he tells her he thinks he's feeling better enough to work a few extra hours in the clinic that afternoon, he thinks that he can hear her fall out of her chair._

_After the phone is hung up and the pills start to fully kick in, he eases himself out of bed, and lurches into the living-room. He does not see James's clothes were he last saw them--dropped indifferently on the carpet, outside of the bedroom door. This absence makes him grateful that he agreed to work the extra time. He doesn't want to be here, not today, not alone, not unable to think._

_As he enters the living-room, his nose is suddenly full of a scent he was not expecting--sugar and batter. He limps closer to the kitchen, and catches the soft sound of a metal frying-pan scraping lightly against the hot coils on his stove-top, the hiss of cooking, a quiet, idle humming of a song he doesn't know. He can't see from this angle, but he's guessing that next to the stove, there's a scatter of boxes, bowls, spoons, bags. And at least one can of macadamia nuts._

_House calls Cuddy back, and tells her that he has tragically relapsed._

_-end-_


End file.
